I've worked with a lot of directors, some of them you wouldn't really attach the word 'artist' to their name.

Choose your mutations carefully...

With MTV in the '80s, you made your album but then you needed to use any money you made to create a video - instead of being able to use that money to pay for you and your band to live on while you wrote new songs. So MTV upped the ante of looking for one hit. Conceptual bands who didn't have a hit were going to lose.

To me I think artists in general make a statement - and for the rest of their lives - every album, every book - are variations on a theme.

When I'm writing a theme song for a TV show I always think, "What would be Pavlovian where a kid would be in the kitchen, or an adult would be in the kitchen, and they hear the theme song come on and it would draw them back to the other room so that they would watch the show?"

We are shocked and saddened by Bob Casale's passing. He not only was integral in DEVO's sound, he worked over twenty years at Mutato, collaborating with me on sixty or seventy films and television shows, not to mention countless commercials and many video games. Bob was instrumental in creating the sound of projects as varied as Rugrats and Wes Anderson's films. He was a great friend. I will miss him greatly.

If you're in music just to become a big, fat rock star, then I probably don't like your music to begin with.